This Is How
by Tragedy Tay
Summary: She's doomed to watch them, though, she's figured that out. It's her heaven and her hell all at once, and she doesn't know what she's goddamn waiting for.


Title: This Is How

Summary: She's doomed to watch them, though, she's figured that out. It's her heaven and her hell all at once, and she doesn't know what she's goddamn waiting for.

Rating: PG-13

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Death suits Marissa.

As long as the casket is facing the right way (and of course the casket is facing the right way, it's Julie Cooper-Nichol's daughter), she's left a good-looking corpse.

Everyone looks at it.

Everyone stares, and admires her alabaster skin, her dark lips, her baby-fine hair.

Not Summer, Marissa's last glimpse of Summer is her gasping for air and Seth pulling her out.

Not Alex, Alex is shivering in her seat, her hand clutched around Ryan's, because that's what needs to happen. Now.

Her mother. Her fucking mother. Julie looks deader than Marissa feels, Marissa has boundless energy now, one second she's staring at them all in her coffin, the next she's floating, she can see Summer sobbing in the grass outside, climbing on Seth's lap and trying to hide.

She can see Luke, who wouldn't come in in the first place too, he's kicking his car, and rubbing his fingers through his hair.

And then she's in the graveyard, and Summer is gone, and Luke is there, and Alex, and Oliver, and they're all there for her, and that's what she's wanted. She wanted everyone to love her.

Seth does not love her. Taylor hates her.

But Marissa is dead, so it doesn't really matter, not really, no.

She's doomed to watch them, though, she's figured that out. It's her heaven and her hell all at once, and she doesn't know what she's goddamn waiting for.

But she's watching.

When Ryan cries at her grave, and leaves flowers every month for five years. And when he stops. She's standing right next to him, and she can push and shove and and scream and kiss him all she wants, but he won't know, he keeps looking up for her when he should be looking straight in front of him.

When Summer and Seth run off and get married, as she watches them drive back to Brown for senior year, she can feel the tiny little spot in Summer, she can see their son even before Summer knows he's there.

It's been three years. And Summer is happy.

When her mother has a new baby. Little Michael. Marissa's brother that she can't touch, can't ruin, can't know. Michael for Marissa, Caleb for Caleb, people they've lost to name the baby they gain. He's amazing and perfect, and Marissa knows when he's born that he will be happy.

It's been five years. And Julie is happy.

When Alex asks Ryan to marry her, curled around him on Marissa's birthday, the sheets around her stomach. She can see inside Ryan's head, and inside Ryan's heart, and inside Ryan's pain. Marissa can't feel pain anymore, but when Ryan says yes, she feels what must be close to it.

It's been ten years. And Ryan is happy.

This is what needs to happen.

They're older now, Marissa hadn't noticed. Seth and Summer and all their kids, Ryan and Alex and their daughter, and they all go to see her baby brother graduate.

Marissa watches, and she can almost feel herself crossing the stage, people cheering for her.

But it's been too long since she's felt anything at all.

When Seth dies five months later, Summer goes to the service, she breathes in and out, and she cradles the last baby she's been left with. Marissa wants to rock her, wants to promise that it will be alright, but she can't, and Taylor does, and Summer shrugs her away, drawing herself to her full height as the little children pull on her skirts, and the older children glare at the ground, and her eldest son leaves, his fiance following.

But Summer stands straight as a pole as her husband is buried, staring stonily ahead as if she was daring the world to break her again.

The second that the coffin is covered, Seth appears next to her, looking very much like a confused little boy.

"Fuck," he says when he sees Marissa, and then he looks back, staring after Summer with something like longing, as if he could feel longing at all. "She's okay?" he begs Marissa, because she's been here longer, she should know.

"She'll be okay," Marissa assures, but she doesn't know, because knowing would be a feeling, and those aren't allowed.

She watches Summer cry when she gets home, like her body is being ripped apart, and Seth goes tense next to Marissa.

"It will stop," she tells him, "eventually." But that only makes it worse, she supposes, in the beginning.

Seth glares at her, and goes to sit next to Summer, rubbing her back, and whispering things that he's always meant to tell her. Even if she can't hear him.

When Ryan dies, Marissa can finally leave, she thinks, maybe she was waiting for him.

But Ryan just nods at her and Seth, and takes his place between them, watching Alex and his grandsons, lacing one hand through one of Marissa's, and waiting.

She's sort of disappointed, but not really.

Never really.

They're all waiting for something that never seems to come, and Marissa is beginning to be annoyed.

Summer is the last to go, twenty years after Seth, ten after Ryan, five after Alex, and too many after Marissa. She's the only one who smiles when she joins them, squealing happily, climbing onto Seth's lap in half a second, and kissing him like she's needed to a million times since he left.

And Marissa turns away, embarrassed, to watch her brother teach his son to play soccer.

The world is long.

And this is how it had to happen.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

end.


End file.
